I’m a speech & debate coach at my old high school. One category is Extemporaneous Speech, in which students are given a current events topic (in US Politics, Foreign Affairs, Economics, etc.) and have 30 minutes to prepare a 7 minute speech. Citations are an important part of these speeches, and internet access is not allowed in the extemp prep room, so teams keep extemp files from which to draw information while prepping their speeches. Depending on the school, these files might be anything from a few dozen recent magazines, to several large tupperware containers filled wither xeroxed articles, to collections of saved pieces on hard drives that students can access on their laptops or tablets.
We’re currently in the process of getting a digital collection of files ready in anticipation of the state championships next weekend. At the least we’ll have a few hundred articles from a handful of sources thrown into a Dropbox account that everyone can access and download. However, given the time strict time limitations when preparing a speech, it would be a big help if all of the text of all of our articles was searchable – so, instead of scanning a long list of article titles to find potentially relevant ones, then scanning several possibly relevant articles to find the possibly relevant information within, students could search for, say, “Syria” and “refugees,” and be able to jump right to the information they’re looking for.
What are the simplest ways to do this? I mean, we could paste every article into one long Word document, but is there anything a little more elegant that can be accomplished (in not much time, by non-experts)? Thanks.